Anyone expecting bombshell revelations from Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before Congress may have been disappointed by repetitive questions and circular responses. But that doesn’t mean we learned nothing important.

We did: When it comes to Facebook, everyone is clueless. And that’s too dangerous a situation for us to allow to carry on.

The cluelessness first made itself apparent when Sen. Chuck Grassley began reading questions obviously prepared for him by his Net-savvy staffers, but which he, himself, clearly did not understand. As most of his colleagues would prove over the hours that followed, it’s hard to know what technology is doing if you have no idea how it works.

But it’s not as if the panel of clueless senators were facing an evil genius. The most surprising thing about Zuckerberg’s answers was not the complexity of his team’s fascinating defense strategy, but his own apparent lack of knowledge: not just about Facebook’s technological capabilities but also about the history and dynamics of the internet.

Anyone expecting bombshell revelations from Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before Congress may have been disappointed by repetitive questions and circular responses. But that doesn’t mean we learned nothing important.

We did: When it comes to Facebook, everyone is clueless. And that’s too dangerous a situation for us to allow to carry on.

The cluelessness first made itself apparent when Sen. Chuck Grassley began reading questions obviously prepared for him by his Net-savvy staffers, but which he, himself, clearly did not understand. As most of his colleagues would prove over the hours that followed, it’s hard to know what technology is doing if you have no idea how it works.

But it’s not as if the panel of clueless senators were facing an evil genius. The most surprising thing about Zuckerberg’s answers was not the complexity of his team’s fascinating defense strategy, but his own apparent lack of knowledge: not just about Facebook’s technological capabilities but also about the history and dynamics of the internet.

For example, everybody seems to agree that “fake news” and Russian misinformation are bad. The only question seems to be how to get rid of it. The senators suggest regulation – but this could backfire, particularly since Facebook is the only player at the table, and will push for regulations that cement its position.

Zuckerberg has always depended on users to identify and flag bad content for him, but this plainly isn’t working. He offers instead that the company is now working on artificial intelligence that can distinguish between real and fake posts. With enough machine learning, he says, this should fix things.

So the problems created by a website built by a college kid, which subsequently grew out of control because of an internet he doesn’t understand, will be policed by algorithms whose ramifications he’ll understand even less. And all this techno-solutionism seems to satisfy the senators, who don’t even understand the technology that’s causing all the trouble.

Ignorance is just the rule of the road, at this point. As if to relieve himself of any culpability for the ongoing compromise of our privacy online, Zuckerberg kept repeating that Facebook users have the choice of what they share.

For example, everybody seems to agree that “fake news” and Russian misinformation are bad. The only question seems to be how to get rid of it. The senators suggest regulation – but this could backfire, particularly since Facebook is the only player at the table, and will push for regulations that cement its position.

Zuckerberg has always depended on users to identify and flag bad content for him, but this plainly isn’t working. He offers instead that the company is now working on artificial intelligence that can distinguish between real and fake posts. With enough machine learning, he says, this should fix things.

So the problems created by a website built by a college kid, which subsequently grew out of control because of an internet he doesn’t understand, will be policed by algorithms whose ramifications he’ll understand even less. And all this techno-solutionism seems to satisfy the senators, who don’t even understand the technology that’s causing all the trouble.

Ignorance is just the rule of the road, at this point. As if to relieve himself of any culpability for the ongoing compromise of our privacy online, Zuckerberg kept repeating that Facebook users have the choice of what they share.